Free Your Breath, Free your Life

In all the major spiritual traditions of the world one finds some sort of chanting—the vocalization or intonation of special sounds, words, mantras, or prayers—to uplift, to heal, and to transform. The prayers and mantras are often intoned on a single breath, which, among many other benefits, has the effect over time of lengthening our exhalation, increasing the strength and movement of our diaphragm, and expanding our breathing capacity.

Though it is seldom approached in this way, the Lord’s Prayer is a good example of a prayer that can be chanted during a single breath. It is said to have very different physiological and spiritual effects on us when it is chanted during a single breath than when it is interrupted by the need to take another breath. The sacred sound om is a good example of a mantra that is chanted during a single breath. The ancient scriptures of both Tantric Buddhism and the Upanishads speak of the power of the chanted om to enlighten us and free us from our karma. These traditions tell us that by chanting om and attuning ourselves to the vibrations of pure being that it awakens, we can experience ourselves as part of the cosmic symphony.

The work with sounds, sacred or otherwise, is intimately related to meditative work, especially to the effort of listening to the vibrations and harmonics of the sounds as they resonate both inside and outside of ourselves. Such work quiets and harmonizes the breath and has a calming influence on the brain and nervous system. Such work also brings us new, more global perceptions and experiences of who we are at all the various levels of ourselves. It can even bring boundless, transformative feelings of joy and happiness.

Copyright 2004-11 by Dennis Lewis. This passage is from my book Free Your Breath, Free Your Life

A Larger Perspective Can Help You Let Go

“Learning to let go, to exhale completely, is in fact a movement into the unknown. When we truly let go, we do not know what will happen next or where we will find ourselves. In letting go, we give up, if only for a moment, a sense of controlling our lives. And even though we know in our heart of hearts that such giving up of control is vital not only for our breath, but also for our inner growth and our happiness, many of us are afraid of allowing it to happen.”

Free Your Breath, Free Your Life, Dennis Lewis

The Art of Happiness

Not many of us would disagree with His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s belief that the “purpose of our lives is to seek happiness.” But in this world of complexity, anxiety, insecurity, conflict, intolerance, anger, and hatred we might be inclined on the one hand to ignore this extraordinary book on the grounds that it is too simplistic or idealistic, or, on the other hand, to agree too readily to its premises without actually practicing the difficult inner and outer work that the Dalai Lama believes is necessary for real happiness.

The Art of Happiness is based on conversations between the Dalai Lama and Dr. Howard Cutler, a Diplomat of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Cutler does a superb job of framing the Dalai Lama’s teachings, stories, and meditations in a way that makes them come alive not just for Buddhists, but for anyone seeking real understanding.

This is a book of profound common sense. Exploring topics such as intimacy, compassion, suffering, anger, kindness, hatred, and change, the Dalai Lama makes clear that real happiness depends on transforming our deepest attitudes, the very way we look at and deal with ourselves and others. It requires “new conditioning.” For the Dalai Lama the first steps toward this new conditioning are based not on mystical or transcendental practices but rather on education, learning, determination, enthusiasm, and effort.

For the Dalai Lama, it is our negative emotions, especially our anger and hatred, that undermine our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being and promote conflict and destruction in the world. The Dalai Lama makes clear that “’The only factor that can give you refuge or protection from the destructive effects of anger and hatred is your practice of tolerance and patience.’”

Though the practice of patience and tolerance may seem impossible with regard to the big things in our lives, the Dalai Lama suggests that we can start with the small things. “By sacrificing small things, by putting up with small problems or hardships, you will be able to forgo experiences or sufferings that can be much more enormous in the future.”

The Dalai Lama throws new light on many of our assumptions. In discussing “genuine humility” and its relationship to patience, for example, he points out that it “involves having the capacity to take a confrontational stance, having the capacity to retaliate if you wish, yet deliberately deciding not to do so.”

For the Dalai Lama, the work of patience and tolerance is a work of will that is based on inner strength, compassion, and presence of mind, not on meekness and passivity. It is this work, done with as much awareness as we can muster, that is especially needed in today’s world.

See also, my essay Some Thoughts on Happiness and Suffering

Dennis Lewis

The purpose of our lives, according to the Dalai Lama,  ”is to seek happiness.”* Although, most of us will agree that what we want most from our lives is happiness, we seldom think and feel and sense deeply about all that this involves.

In most dictionaries, happiness is defined as having to do with luck and good fortune, pleasure and satisfaction. And most of us, most of the time, define our happiness using these sorts of terms in relation to our images of health, family, money, friends, security, jobs, possessions, and so on.

There are moments, however, when we know in our heart of hearts that another, deeper form of happiness exists—the happiness that we feel when we let go of all of our conceptions about who we are and are able to experience the miraculous nature of what we call “ordinary life.” That we exist at all, that we have the opportunity to participate in the extraordinary mystery of life, is the greatest “good fortune” imaginable. Yet, for most of us, the miracle that lies at the heart of our own existence is the one fact that always seems to elude us, the one fact that we always seem to forget.

It does not take much observation of our daily lives to see why we so easily forget. Almost everything in our media-driven culture is designed to suggest that we are lacking something and to entice us to purchase something, to believe something, to be something, or to do something that will “bring happiness.” Society conditions us to a negative self-image, in which whatever we have is never enough. And we identify with these suggestions and influences, as well as with our reactions to them, imagining that our happiness is somehow bound up with them. But, of course, the problem isn’t just the result of our identification with what influences us. The problem is also, and perhaps more centrally, the result of our identification with the images we have of ourselves that allow these influences to shape and define us so deeply. It is these images, many of them negative, that fuel our suggestibility, our assumption that this object, that person, this job, that success, that politician, this spiritual experience, that pursuit will somehow improve our lives, make us better people, and bring us happiness.

And so, we suffer. I am not here talking about the inevitable suffering of war, pain, disease, trauma, and loss. No, I am talking about the unnecessary suffering that we bring on ourselves through chronic negativity. The Dalai Lama points out that it is our negative emotions, especially our anger and hatred, that undermine our physical, psychological, and spiritual well-being and promote conflict and destruction in the world. (Just listen to discussions on FOX News or CNN or talk radio, or better yet to yourself and others discussing the current problems facing us all.) The Dalai Lama also makes clear that “The only factor that can give you refuge or protection from the destructive effects of anger and hatred is your practice of tolerance and patience.”* But who, besides a very small minority of people, actually practice tolerance and patience?

Of course, a lot of our intolerance and impatience, and thus the negativity bound up with them, arises, first, because our self-definitions and expectations of ourselves and others are so often illusory and unrealizable, and second, because even when they are realizable they most often do not reflect who and what we really are, or the actual forces at work in society. Even more important, they do not reflect the miracle of being alive on this earth, and of our great opportunity to engage consciously now in this miracle.

To be alive, in the highest sense of this word, means to be filled with life, to be able to receive, contain, and transform whatever life brings us—until it brings us nothing more. To live life fully and freely means to experience all sides of life as they present themselves to us: joy and suffering, love and hate, pleasure and pain, insight and ignorance, unity and fragmentation, hope and disappointment, clarity and confusion, and so on. This is the only real freedom—the freedom, whether we like or dislike any particular experience, whether we accept it, fight it, or try to change it–is to remember and feel the mystery and miracle of what we have come to call “the ordinary.” For it is this re-membering of our wholeness, this conscious re-connection with and welcoming of all sides of ourselves and our lives, that brings the happiness that we truly wish for.

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*The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler, M.D. (Riverhead Books: New York, 1998), hardcover, 322 pages.

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Lewis

“Can the mind heal the body? How are the brain, immune system, and emotions interconnected? What emotions are associated with enhanced well-being? How does mindfulness function in a medical context? Is there a biological foundation for ethics? How can death help us understand the nature of the mind?”

In the summer of 1991, ten well-known scientists, psychologists, meditation teachers and other scholars came together with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala India “to grapple with these questions.” This book is a record of conversations that took place during this event—the Third Mind and Life Conference.

There are some, of course, who may say that the effort to understand reality through a dialogue between religion and science is misguided at best. But even if this were the case, Buddhism is not a religion in the ordinary sense of the term. One need not “believe in” the Buddha to practice Buddhism. For our beliefs, like our other attachments, are often what keep us from opening to reality, the miraculous emptiness that underlies the fundamental interdependence of all life.

What is unusual about Healing Emotions is the way in which it explores this “interdependence” through a continual questioning that expands our view of the world and explores relationships between things that we thought were unrelated. This should come as no surprise, however, since in the introduction we are told that “Buddhism has as principal aims the goal of transforming perception and experience and synchronizing mind and body.”

Healing Emotions explores the relationships between such subjects as cellular biology, stress, emotions, moods, headaches, immunology, visceral learning, self-esteem, virtue and morality, greed, mindfulness, death, self-acceptance, responsibility, consciousness, compassion, and much else. This thought-provoking book is a testament not only to the Dalai Lama’s far-reaching search for ways to better understand the many challenges facing us today, but also to his underlying “affection” for other human beings and their ideas and experiences.

“I believe that human affection is the basis … of human nature,” says the Dalai Lama. “Without that, you can’t get satisfaction or happiness as an individual; and without that foundation, the whole human community can’t get satisfaction either. In my day-to-day thinking, I always take into account the total environment, the whole community.”

Whether or not one believes that “affection” is the basis of human nature, it is becoming increasingly clear that the growing lack of genuine affection in modern life, of loving kindness toward oneself and others, is closely related to our lack of awareness of the “total environment.” And without this sense of the total environment—and the urgent sense of conscience that comes with it—any real transformation is next to impossible.

Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions, and Health

Sunset in an Unknown Land

My teacher was a man who traveled a great deal, both inside and out. Nonetheless, his statement aroused some big questions in me, questions that I hadn’t asked before. Other than traveling for the most obvious reasons–such as to relocate or for business or to see friends–why travel to other cities and countries at all? What was I looking for? What did I hope to experience or gain? Was I hoping to open my heart and mind to how others lived? Was I hoping to learn more about my own conditioning and limitations by traveling to other places? Would traveling inspire me? Would it make me happier, as it seemed to promise? I knew, for some people at least, that it was true, as Mark Twain said, that “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But I also sensed some truth in what Blaise Pascal wrote in Pensées: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.” Perhaps both these insights can be summed up in Henry Miller’s statement that “One’s destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”

Since those early days I’ve traveled to many places (though not as many as I would like), even to Russia where I met some extraordinary people in extraordinary condtions, and the question still remains, why travel at all, especially since most of my trips were only short ones, often no more than a week or two–certainly not enough time to truly understand how people in other countries perceive and live their lives.

When I inadvertently picked up The Art of Travel by Alain de Botton, I was immediately struck not just by the book’s originality, but also by the way it resonated with some of my own experiences and questions. I had always found that the reality of travel, when I was actually present to it, had little to do with my expectations of what it would bring. And I’ve always marveled at how trips are often reduced by all of us to a few “critical moments” and “photographic highlights” that, as de Botton says, “lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.” For most of us, the destination, and perhaps a few incidents on the way, are what we most remember; the process of traveling itself is seldom remembered or discussed. We represent our travels to ourselves and others very much like the travel books we read. Here is one of the ways the author describes it:

“A travel book may tell us, for example, that the narrator journeyed through the afternoon to reach the hill town of X and after a night in its medieval monastery awoke to a misty dawn. But we never simply ‘journey through an afternoon’. We sit in a train. Lunch digests awkwardly within us. The seat cloth is grey. We look out the window at a field. We look back inside. A drum of anxieties revolves in our consciousness. We notice a luggage label affixed to a suitcase in a rack above the seats opposite. We tap a finger on the window ledge. A broken nail on an index finger catches a thread. It starts to rain. A drop wends a muddy path down the dust-coated window. We wonder where our ticket might he. We look back out at the field, It continues to rain.

At last the train starts to move. It passes an iron bridge, after which it inexplicably stops, A fly lands on the window. And still we may have reached the end only of the first minute of a comprehensive account of the events lurking within the deceptive sentence ‘he journeyed through the afternoon.’” And, of course, Botton hasn’t even mentioned here the many associations that these events arouse in our thoughts and emotions, as well as the often dull and heavy sensations they arouse in our bodies.

The Art of Travel is organized into five sections “Departure,” “Motives,” “Landscape,” “Art,” and “Return.” Each chapter begins with one of the author’s own travel experiences, then introduces paintings, photographs, poetry, and insights from famous artists, poets, novelists, and others related to that experience. Some of the “guides” on our journey are J.K. Huysmans, Charles Baudelaire, Edward Hopper, Gustave Flaubert, Alexander von Humbolt, William Wordsworth, Edmund Burke, Job, Vincent van Gogh, John Ruskin, and Xavier de Maistre.

In the book’s last chapter, “On Habit,” the author spends some time discussing Xavier de Maistre’s rather audacious book Journey around My Bedroom. De Maistre, of course, had traveled much in his life, but, according to de Botton, this book, which de Maistre believed would bring the benefits of travel to millions of people who may otherwise be too “indolent” to actually step outside their house, may leave the reader “feeling a little betrayed,” since it “becomes mired in long and wearing digressions” about his dog, sweetheart, and servant. Nonetheless, says de Botton, “de Maistre’s work sprang from a profound and suggestive insight: the notion that the pleasure we derive from a journey may be dependent more on the mind-set we travel with than on the destination we travel to.”

Alain de Botton asks: “What, then, is a travelling mind-set?”. His simple answer is “receptivity,” which requires both “humility” and the giving up of “rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting.” If one ponders this simple answer, one see that these very qualities are also required for awakening here and now to the truth of our being.

Alain de Botton ends this beautiful and insightful book with the sage observation that “There are some who have crossed deserts, floated on ice caps and cut their ways through jungles but whose souls we would search in vain for evidence of what they have witnessed. Dressed in pink-and-blue pyjamas, satisfied within the confines of his own bedroom, Xavier de Maistre was gently nudging us to try, before taking off for distant hemispheres, to notice what we have already seen.”

I recommend The Art of Travel for everyone, whether your travels take you to distant lands, unknown dimensions of yourself, or only around the bedroom you think you know so well.

Copyright 2009 by Dennis Lewis. This is a revised version of a review that appeared in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of The Journal of Harmonious Awakening.

Max Picard

In this profoundly illuminating book, first published in 1948, renowned Swiss philosopher Max Picard expresses the nature and meaning of silence in poetic, lyrical, and honest language that helps call forth the silence that lies as the mostly unrecognized source of our own being. Without fanfare, the book “takes us back to the beginning of things.”

Demonstrating that silence can indeed be spoken about in a way that does not denude it of its power to transform and awaken, Picard takes us on a journey into ourselves, covering such topics (all chapter titles) as the nature of silence, the silence in speech, the ego and silence, knowledge and silence, love and silence, time and silence, the noise of words, and many more.

Even a few words from this book can help us understand, in an entirely new way, some of the many problems that face us in today’s noise-filled world, where communication consists mainly of sound bites designed to promote some personal, social, political, or spiritual viewpoint, agenda, or action. So, instead of attempting to “review” this book, I shall let you hear from Picard himself, offering some quotations that have impacted my own life.

“In every moment of time, man through silence can be with the origins of all things.” (p. 22)

“Silence contains everything within itself. It is not waiting for anything; it is always wholly present in itself and it completely fills out the space in which it appears.” (p. 18)

“Where silence is, man is observed by silence. Silence looks at man more than man looks at silence.” (p. 17)

“Not until one man speaks to another, does he learn that speech no longer belongs to silence but to man. He learns it through the Thou of the other person, for through the Thou the word first belongs to man and no longer to silence. When two people are conversing with one another, however, a third is always present: Silence is listening. That is what gives breadth to a conversation: when the words are not moving merely within the narrow space occupied by the two speakers, but come from afar, from the place where silence is listening. That gives the words a new fullness. But not only that: the words are spoken as it were from the silence, from that third person, and the listener receives more than the speaker alone is able to give. Silence is the third speaker in such a conversation. At the end of the Platonic dialogues it is always as though silence itself were speaking. The persons who were speaking seem to have become listeners to silence.” (p. 25)

“Today words no longer arise out of silence, through a creative act of the spirit which gives meaning to language and to the silence, but from other words, from the noise of other words. Neither do they return to the silence but into the noise of other words, to become immersed therein.” (p. 168)

“When the substance of silence is present in a man, all his qualities are centered in it; they are all connected primarily with the silence and only secondarily with each other. Therefore it is not so easy for the defect of one quality to infect all the others, since it is kept in its place by the silence. But if there is no silence, a man can be totally infected by a single defect so that he ceases to be a man …” (p. 70)

“There is an immeasurability in happiness that only feels at home in the breadth of silence. Happiness and silence belong together just as do profit and noise.” (p. 71)

For those interested in awakening to the miracle of their own wholeness, this is a book that, once opened, will be a lifetime companion. Just a few minutes of reading in the middle of your busy day can help you rediscover “the substance of silence” in your own words and actions–or at least show you how out of touch with silence your words and actions actually are.

All quotations From Max Picard, The World of Silence, Gateway Editions (Washington D.C., 1988). This review was first published in the August 2008 issue of The Journal of Harmonious Awakening.

Following Your Breath Into Silence